My Animal Crossing island isn’t a spot in the ocean so much as it’s a gap in the day. It’s a place I return to at least once every 24 hours. Like Dale Cooper and his coffee, I don’t plan for it, I just let it happen. In between the school run, the inbox, whatever I’m writing and whatever I need to leave the house for, there will surely be that glittering moment when the Switch – or the Switch 2 – calls to me, where I wonder how Spike is doing today, and where I feel like a trip to the Roost would hit pretty good right about now.
This surprises me, really. Every Animal Crossing I’ve played, and I suspect I’ve played them all by this point, captures me, holds me tight and then eventually lets me drift away. I’ve certainly had time away from New Horizons, weeks away, even the odd month. But for some reason I return. I always do. I thought I’d be done once I had a good set of villagers. I was sure I’d be done once I finished the art gallery. Nope. Months later here I am. How are you, Spike? Still grumpy? 200 Bells for a coffee? That sounds pretty good, Brewster.
All of which makes the latest, and largely unexpected, update a little weird for people like me. This January’s drop of new bits and pieces is presumably there not for the players who never left, but to tempt the players who have drifted back to their island for a few more hours. How about a megaphone? Does that do anything for you? How about a few quality-of-life tweaks? How about an entirely new hotel, and you can decorate the rooms, one by one?
Fine, I guess. All of this stuff is fine. And I kind of love the hotel, just because who doesn’t love a weird hotel down by the seaside? It chimes rather well with the transience and slight melancholy that Animal Crossing always keeps in the mix somewhere. I went in to check it out a few days back, lingered in the lobby, did up a room in a seaside style and another – I can’t remember the vibe I was asked to match in the other. Then I went outside and Tom Nook called me over and asked me to do a favour that seemed so complicated, so unnecessary, that I zoned out as he was explaining it to me. After that? After that I went back to the Roost for another imaginary coffee – 200 Bells.
There is a point to all of this, I promise. And the point is pretty simple: new stuff in Animal Crossing always feels like a test to me. Here’s this new chain of busywork. Here’s this new collectable, a new token in an economy filled with tokens. It’s fun, probably, but it’s fun that’s leading somewhere. You’re decorating all the rooms in a hotel. You’re filling up the art gallery, the dinosaur museum, you’re paying off your mortgage. I get drawn into this stuff for a while, and then I realise what I think it’s really for: it’s the same thing I once felt lurking beneath the surface of the original Animal Crossing back on the GameCube. The game offers you a treadmill to encourage you to reach your limit, to step off the treadmill, and then to enjoy the little things in life.
And this, I would argue, is where every Animal Crossing really excels, even one that can feel as sparse, at times, as New Horizons does. This is a game for endless, aimless wandering, for late night rambles through the trees, for stepping out of your house and seeing a villager just messing around on the town square. My greatest pleasures here aren’t paying something off or collecting the last piece of a set, or even knowing that every guest in the new hotel is enjoying a room I put together. The greatest pleasures are smaller and deeper: recognising the time of day by the music playing, wandering to a distant part of the island I haven’t visited for a while and staring out to sea, going back to Brewster just to check in and have that delicious virtual coffee.
To wit: I think it’s great Nintendo’s updated the game once again, and in time I probably will design a few more rooms in that hotel. But the more stuff there is in the game, the more reason I have to look past the stuff when I find that spare three or four minutes every day when the stuff of my real life is temporarily at bay and the Switch 2 is calling to me.
